Menil wins AIA's 25-Year Award

The Menil Collection offers gift memberships at various levels. For more info, visit www.menil.org.

Photo By Style Gift Guide

The Menil Collection offers gift memberships at various levels. For more info, visit www.menil.org.

Photo By Dave Rossman/Freelance

Members of Houston City Dance along with volunteers performed at a celebration of the Menil's 25th year in September.

You probably don't have to tell Houstonians who've enjoyed it all these years, but it's now official. The American Institute of Architects has confirmed that Renzo Piano's design for the Menil Collection has stood the test of time by bestowing its 2013 AIA Twenty-five Year Award on the musuem.

In a statement, AIArchitect managing editor Zach Mortice explained how the modest neighborhood museum set a new precedent in museum architecture, also propelling Piano into superstardom.

The Italian master had shocked the world five years earlier with his bombastic, industrial-edge design for Paris' Centre Pompidou, surrounded by streets that hadn't changed much since the French Revolution. The Menil, by comparison, seemed perfectly of its place - and still does - more quietly forward-looking, not out of scale with its surrounding gray bungalows.

It has always inspired from the inside as well, where the natural light filtering through the curvy, sculptural leaves of its inventively-engineered roof and glass ceiling washes the space with a sense of calm.

When he accepted the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1998, Piano said light is much a part of composition as the shapes and volumes of buildings.

"With the Menil, Piano has carried forth the Southern European Renaissance tradition of handcrafted technological humanism into another century, and brought the world a transcendent space for viewing art that places the collection, and its presentation in perfectly realized natural light, above all else," Mortice writes.

The award will be formally presented in June, at the AIA's annual convention in Denver.

The AIA provided these comments from the 16-member jury that awarded the prize:

The Menil Collection is a monument of 20th century architecture that still resonates today.

Its innovative means of indirect lighting can be, and has been, applied to other building typologies and evolved in Piano's ongoing work.

Timeless - still an amazing precedent for museum design, daylighting, and a clean plan - it's about the contents, not the building itself.

Contextually responsive to it's interesting low scale neighborhood it influenced this quadrant of Houston in many different ways.